Each year, Gartner releases its Magic Quadrants that delve into and rank different providers across an array of technological marketplaces. This year marked the first time that Gartner examined the hyperconverged infrastructure sector, and Nutanix was named as a market leader.

Currently, an increasing number of businesses are replacing their legacy infrastructure with more advanced and streamlined hyperconverged systems. No matter what type of infrastructure a company relies on, it’s imperative that IT stakeholders can work proactively to provide users with the best performance possible.

Defining hyperconverged infrastructure

First and foremost, it’s important to understand what hyperconverged infrastructure is, and what it can help organizations accomplish. As Nutanix noted, the current IT environment – in which high demand for enterprise applications puts considerable stress on legacy systems – is in need of a change. Hyperconverged infrastructure effectively tackles these obstacles, helping to streamline operations like management and scaling more connected and unified infrastructure to support agility.

This style of infrastructure typically includes a distributed data plane as well as a management plane, both of which are software defined and don’t require proprietary hardware. In this way, resources like storage capacity are pooled and more fluid, and cloud-based systems can be more easily launched and utilized.

As CIO pointed out, hyperconverged infrastructure designs also enable lower total cost of ownership and better performance, and are ideally suited for addressing rising modernization needs.

“The disruption being caused by hyperconvergence is due to its ability to reduce costs as well as complexity, hence its initial penetration at the lower end of the market,” observes Drew Robb of Enterprise Storage Forum. “This has caused many small and mid-sized organizations to abandon typical storage area network (SAN) and network attached storage (NAS) models in favor of a more streamlined and less expensive approach.”

“Nutanix has proven to its 7,800 hyperconverged infrastructure users that its services are industry-leading.”

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant

Hyperconvergence is a relatively new area within the infrastructure market. 2018 was the first year that Gartner created a Magic Quadrant for providers in this sector, rating vendors according to their “ability to execute and completeness of vision,” according to CRN. The highest rating vendors can achieve is Leaders, signaling that Gartner considers the businesses successful in both vision and execution.

Gartner’s first Hyperconverged Infrastructure Magic Quadrant included only 12 providers, and Nutanix earned a coveted Leader spot. Nutanix has proven to its 7,800 hyperconverged infrastructure users that its services are industry-leading.

“Against much larger competitors like Dell EMC and HPE, which can underprice Nutanix, the vendor has positioned itself as having a best-of-breed strategy with software-defined HCI that is intelligence-based, multi-hypervisor and multi-cloud with unified management,” CRN contributor Mark Haranas wrote.

Monitoring hyperconverged infrastructure

As organizations increasingly move toward hyperconverged infrastructure design, it’s imperative that performance monitoring remains a top priority. Galileo Performance Explorer, an IPM industry leader, supports Nutanix and can provide critical monitoring metrics for storage and compute capacity as well as cluster and management latency. In addition, the release of Galileo’s comprehensive Nutanix agent in Q2 2018 will provide even more insights into hyperconverged infrastructure systems.